The National Transportation Safety Board will bring in state oversight groups from around the country to testify at the hearings into the June 22 Metro crash to highlight their safety methods.
NTSB Chairwoman Debbie Hersman said Monday during a speech at the National Press Club that the outside groups could provide guidance on how federal officials could make safety oversight more “robust.”
Her independent federal investigative board has scheduled two days of hearings in February on the deadly Red Line crash that killed nine and injured dozens more. The hearings are slated to focus on the safety culture of Metro but also look at the broader safety oversight of transit systems nationwide.
Unlike other major transportation systems such as Amtrak, the airlines or even the local MARC and Virginia Railway Express commuter trains, transit agencies such as Metro do not answer to any federal inspections or uniform set of safety standards. The NTSB can only investigate major accidents and lacks the authority to force Metro to follow its safety recommendations.
Instead the transit agencies currently face a hodgepodge of oversight from state safety groups that vary as much as the various subway systems they are mandated to watch.
Locally the Tri-State Oversight Committee that oversees Metro lacks teeth. It has never used the one penalty it is authorized to seek against the transit agency: Asking federal officials to withhold up to 5 percent of Metro’s federal funding. But California’s oversight agency, for example, has stopped transit systems from running if they didn’t meet safety criteria.
Locally the Tri-State Oversight Committee that oversees Metro lacks teeth. It has never used the one penalty it is authorized to seek against the transit agency: Asking federal officials to withhold up to 5 percent of Metro’s federal funding. But California’s oversight agency, for example, has stopped transit systems from running if they didn’t meet safety criteria.
However, both Congress and the Department of Transportation are proposing ways of creating federal safety standards for subway systems such as Metro.
Hersman also said in an interview Monday that although the safety board has already made some recommendations to Metro in the wake of the crash, it will not release a probable cause into why one Metro train crashed into another near the Fort Totten rail station until it completes its final report and recommendations. She said the agency is pushing to finish the report within a year of the crash, though, faster than usual for the agency.
